The Trail of Death, Virgin River, Utah, 16 January 2017

"Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo device is 'always getting smarter' — but making us dumber." ~NYT op ed lede

Along the shore the flood had rearranged,

Daughter told body, " I call this the trail

Of death." Why? Bucolic spot in the sun,

Green-brown skein of stream, fine sand deposits,

Grand, sheer cliffs glowing against the blue egg

Of atmosphere, what's particularly 

Death about this? "We saw a coyote

Totally dead lying here. We felt bad."

Ah, body said, I see, although body

Saw something else in imagination

Not to do with coyotes, entirely.

Never mind. Never, ever again mind.

Three hours of perfect play ensued: mud cakes,

Sand castles, Pooh sticks under the footbridge.

Body resting on a rock was watching

Another rock askew high up a slope

Overgrown with outcropping rocks askew.

Here's what was bothersome about numbers.

Given the millions of boulders tilting,

It was inevitable some soon fell.

Focus on any one likely suspect,

It amounted to a dead certainty

You would not catch its fall. This is the law

Of lotteries: the most prosaic end,

Inevitable in the general,

Is miracle in the particular.

This was what body had learned from culture,

Culture dependent on stupidity

Dependent on culture. This had gone on

For at least a few hundred thousand years,

Maybe much more: culture getting smarter,

Making us dumber, prion-infested

Miracles of self-domestication

Prior even to any knock-on sheep

Or goats or rice or wheat. Imitation 

Began the accumulation. Language 

Increased storage and portability,

Stories especially. Writing, numbers 

Increased storage and portability. 

Libraries increased storage, codices 

And scrolls portability. Letter-block

Printing presses increased storage, access,

And portability. Daily papers, 

Telegraph wires, telephones, undersea 

Cables, celluloid, radio stations,  

Television, computer servers, webs

Of mail and specialized applications, 

Universal search engines, now AI 

Androids answering off-the-cuff questions:

They all made culture smarter, us dumber.

Too late now to complain about yourself.

You were the body, dim, or the answers,

Clever, or you were neither, carried down

The rain-choked river like the coyote 

You were and I never. You were the blue 

Lid of the eggshell closing forever,

The rude mechanical under a spell,

Unable to answer, save as compelled,

The daughter herself, explaining rivers,

The shore the flood had rearranged itself.